At the Centre of the Old World: Trade anal Manufacturing in Venice
and the Venetian Mainland, 1400-1800, edited by Paola Lanaro. Toronto,
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2003. vii, 412 pp.
$32.00 Cdn (paper).

Despite this collection's title, the essays in At the Centre
of the Old World focus almost entirely on manufacturing and mostly on
the period 1e00 to 1800. They are about evenly distributed between those
on Venice and those on the Venetian mainland, although the close
relations that tied the economies of the two parts of Venetian territory
to each other means that each figures in essays focused primarily on the
other. Venetian economic policies and political rule, as well as
Venice's role as a magnet of trade and talent and a market for
mainland products, necessarily affected heavily the development of trade
and manufacturing alike in the mainland territories. The primary goal of
the essays is to demonstrate that the Venetian economy (in the larger
sense of the city and mainland alike) was far more flexible and
adaptable during the early modern era than historians have realized.
Scholars have tended to equate the relative decline of Venice's
economic clout in relationship to the rest of Europe, as well as the
absolute decline in Venetian political power in the Mediterranean and
beyond, with economic stagnation and impoverishment. Paola Lanaro, the
editor of this collection, strives to showcase the recent research of a
number of Italian scholars whose work has remained little known outside
the sphere of Italian economic historians, in part because most of it
has been published in Italian. In this respect she has succeeded
admirably, even though a better copy-editing of the translated essays
would have been useful. Much of this research has been done in local
archives and with difficult and cumbersome documents such as notary records, and some of the contributors synthesize admirably not only
their own research, but that of local historians whose work otherwise
would not reach scholars not immersed in Italian history. Thus, this
collection performs a valuable service to scholars of early modern
European history.

The essays in this collection also engage with a number of
historiographical debates, some of them more relevant and less dated
than others. Whether, for example, Mendels's model of
proto-industrialization, which, as Francesco Vianello among other
contributors to this volume points out, has been so critiqued and
nuanced that it resembles more of a "tool box" than a coherent
theory, is useful at all for understanding the development of
manufacturing in and around Venice is questionable. Similarly,
Wallerstein's dichotomy of "center" and
"periphery," designed to schematize the relationship between
"the West and the rest" in world history, seems ill-suited to
the relationship between Venice and the mainland, especially as the
latter had a number of smaller centres of its own, some of which
gradually bypassed Venice and developed thriving economic relationships
with cities elsewhere in Italy and north of the Alps. Even among world
historians centre and periphery models have been critiqued, nuanced, and
disassembled to the point where their usefulness in understanding
economic relationships is doubtful. It is likely that the discussion,
seemingly more pro forma than heartfelt, of centre and periphery raised
in some of these essays could have been bypassed without diminishing the
value of the book.

More useful and important are the new insights into the role of
regional markets, rural industry--a still highly-neglected area of
research--guilds, and, especially, gender and class in labour markets
that emerge in the essays in this collection. The picture these essays
create is one of both competition and of complementary economies. The
Venetian government struggled to find the right combination between the
two, allowing the rise of rural industries that would complement the
trade and manufacturing in the city of Venice without undercutting
Venice's control of international markets and of the most lucrative
and technologically advanced forms of manufacturing, yet not stifle
competition to the point that technological innovation disappeared and
monopolists could run up prices at will. As a rule, this meant that the
rulers of Venice were more likely to pander to the interests of the
city's powerful merchants--in many cases thus to themselves or
their close relatives--to sustain Venice's control of international
trade, and less willing to meet the demands of the city's other
guilds to shut out all competition from the mainland, or from newcomers
within the City, if that meant prohibiting a potentially lucrative new
manufacturing technique, stifling all competition among manufacturers,
or driving out an entrepreneur. Moreover, even if reluctantly at times,
Venice experimented with products and production techniques to adapt its
manufacturing sector to the new realities of changing European markets.
The city's openness toward entrepreneurs, innovation, and
competition grew during the eighteenth century in part precisely because
the economic competition became stiffer.

Still, compared to other manufacturing centres, especially north of
the Alps, Venice's adopting of new manufacturing technology and
products was slow and incomplete. This was not, however, the result of
backward or economically irrational policies. Rather, as Andrea Mozzato,
Marcello Della Valentine, Francesca Trivellato, and Walter Panciera all
point out in their essays on Venice in the first half of the collection,
when Venetians chose, in particular, to forgo labour-saving technology,
due often to opposition from guilds, the choice was not as deleterious as it' might seem because owners of manufacturing enterprises, with
the support and collusion of the Venetian government, were willing to
innovate with labour regimes instead, in particular through widespread
use of poorly paid female labour that received little or no protection
from the guilds. Thus, from the point-of-view of non-specialists in
Italian economic history, the most important contribution of these
essays is to reinforce strongly what women's historians already
knew, that women comprised a significant portion of the early modern
labour force and that their earning comprised a significant and
sometimes dominant portion of the family income. Women's labour may
have been less wellpaid, lower status, and less steady than that of men,
but it was not necessarily either less skilled or less
"professional" than that their male counterparts;

Much manufacturing, especially that which women performed, was
relocated outside of the city proper during this period, however, to the
suburbs and the countryside of the mainland, in part to allow for
greater freedom to adopt new labour regimes. The essays on the Venetian
mainland are significant especially because even though the total
population of Venetian territory became more rural during the early
modern era, and especially after the plague of 1630, and the economic
significance of the mainland cities and towns relative to that of the
capital rose, the tendency has been to focus on the city of Venice.
Moreover, historians have gauged the fortunes of Venice excessively in
terms of its trade with the Ottoman Empire and its role as an entrepet
in the spice trade at a time when the Atlantic routes to Asia were
diminishing Venice's role in that trade. Yet, as the research of
Edoardo Demo, Carlo Marco Belfanti, Giovanni Favero, Luca Mocarelli, and
Francesco Vianello, the contributors of essays on the mainland, shows,
the vitality of the mainland economy, rural and urban alike, did much to
compensate for Venice's declining share of trade with Asia.
Moreover, as Maurice Aymard points out in his conclusion to this volume,
the aggregate picture of Venice that results from the research in these
essays is that of a Venice less exceptional and less aligned with the
cherished image of Renaissance Venice, but more "European,"
more like the cities to which Venice's economic and political
significance in Europe supposedly passed in the sixteenth through the
eighteenth centuries.

Gayle K. Brunelle

California State University, Fullerton

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